BOOK LAUNCH DELHI: COMMUNITIES OF BELONGING

BOOK LAUNCH DELHI: COMMUNITIES OF BELONGING

THURSDAY 8 DECEMBER, 6:30 – 8PM

RIVINGTON PLACE

“Join us for a glass of wine to celebrate the launch of Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh’s new photo book Delhi: Communities of Belonging (The New Press, November 2016)

Listen to the authors introduce their latest work depicting India’s emerging LGBTQ community with a Q&A session and free wine reception for the audience.

“… A visible queer community has emerged in Delhi over the past two decades. What was silent and private has emerged into the public sphere. Gupta’s and Singh’s work bears testimony to this.”– Indian historian and gay studies scholar, Saleem Kidwai

Delhi: Communities of Belonging by noted photographers Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh offers a powerful series of more than 150 photographs and companion first-person texts, which together present an unprecedented portrait of LGBTQ people’s lives in India today. Focusing on the city of Delhi, Gupta and Singh chronicle the halting emergence of networks of men and women living under the shadow of stigma and criminalized behavior — in a country where anti-sodomy laws dating back to the British Empire were recently struck down, only to be reaffirmed in a surging wave of homophobia.

The photographs reflect the photographers’ celebrated capacity for entering into lives rarely seen. Through twenty unique stories, Delhi invites the viewer into the daily routines, work, homes, and intimate lives of their subjects from different backgrounds — from urban professionals to day laborers.

A visually arresting document in its own right, Delhi presents readers with a starting point for understanding the profound struggles for recognition by India’s LGBTQ community. ”